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(AP Photo/Charlie Riedel) On August 7, 2018, Missouri voters rejected the state's "right to work" law by a margin of 2 to 1. trickle-downers.jpg M issouri unions will have little time to catch their breath after their decisive victory at the ballot box on Tuesday. By a 2-to-1 margin, voters in the Show Me State rejected a “right to work” law that would have allowed both public- and private-sector workers in unionized workplaces to opt out of paying dues to the unions that would still be required to bargain contracts for them and represent them in disputes with management. Similar “right to work” legislation has led to significant drops in union revenues and rolls in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana. Missouri Republicans had for decades pushed for the law, and finally got their chance after the 2016 election of former Governor Eric Greitens, who was forced to resign in June amid a months-long scandal and felony charges. The ballot initiative would have made Missouri the...

(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) House Speaker Paul Ryan closes the door before speaking at a news conference after a Republican caucus meeting on July 24, 2018. trickle-downers.jpg W ith midterm elections quickly approaching, House Republicans have bet on tax cuts as their ticket to remaining in power in November. Now, they’re doubling down on that bet. On Tuesday, GOP members of the House Ways and Means Committee released a two-page policy outline for a second round of tax cuts to build on and draw attention to what they believe to be the still unnoticed virtues of their landmark tax act passed in December, which has lost popularity with voters in the past few months. The "tax reform 2.0" would make permanent various (mostly regressive) individual tax breaks included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that were set to expire in 2025 as well as offer a variety of retirement and family saving incentives. The value of one such incentive, the 529 College Savings Accounts, depends entirely on the...

(AP Photo/Brynn Anderson) Immigrant children walk in line outside the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children in Homestead, Florida, on June 20, 2018. “ Violent animals.” “Menace.” “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing.” This is the language that President Donald Trump and members of his administration have used to describe immigrants both entering and already in the country. It’s a two-step process: First, intentionally employ imprecise speech to condemn undocumented youth as a whole and then, quietly, qualify the comments. It wasn’t all undocumented youth that they meant, you see—just the MS-13 gang members, just the bad guys. But this policy of ambiguity is far from harmless. Even before Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other sub-agencies of the Department of Homeland Security tasked with the internal enforcement of immigration law had been known to use even the most baseless rumor of gang affiliation as a cudgel against immigrant youth, often resulting in...

Prarinya/Shutterstock trickle-downers_54.jpg T he fight over increasing the tipped minimum wage in Washington, D.C., is making for strange bedfellows. Having long bemoaned congressional Republicans’ habit of meddling in District affairs, a majority of the D.C. Council now find themselves in the uncomfortable position of joining in common cause with two members of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus. The Republican representatives—Mark Meadows of North Carolina, who chairs the Freedom Caucus, and Gary Palmer of Alabama—moved Wednesday to block Initiative 77, a voter-approved ballot measure that would increase the minimum wage for tipped workers in the District. The measure passed with 55 percent of the vote in the June primary elections after a vicious (and expensive) messaging campaign to defeat it. The Freedom Caucus push arrived the day after seven of the council’s 13 members co-introduced legislation to overturn Initiative 77, aligning local Democrats and congressional...

GDA via AP Images Hooked on Drugmakers: For decades, tax favoritism—now withdrawn—brought pharmaceutical companies to the island and provided manufacturing jobs at well below mainland wages. This article appears in the Summer 2018 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here . I n keeping with the anti-Latino posture of the Trump administration, Puerto Rico has been subjected to a double policy assault on top of the natural disaster of Hurricane Maria. First, FEMA has failed dismally to respond to the human suffering and nearly $100 billion in damage from the hurricane, a display of both low priority and sheer incompetence that never would have been tolerated in a mainland state such as Florida where citizens can vote. Recent research suggests that the actual death toll caused by the hurricane could be more than 70 times the figure put out by the Puerto Rican government. And now, in the 2017 Republican Tax Act, the Republican Congress has added to Puerto Rico’s misery. It...